I’ve never seen writing as any kind of romantic calling, but simply a matter of what I do. I have no interest in abstract ideas of the muse, preferring to spend my time quietly working. Raised on a dairy farm in eastern Ontario, I didn’t see my father wait for inspiration to feed or milk the cows, or harvest crops. He woke at dawn and immediately set to work. For more than twenty years now, I’ve done my version of the same, waking to sit in front of laptop (after years of longhand notebook) and begin.

It was in my early twenties that I read a quote about writing attributed to Margaret Atwood: If you want full-time out of it, you have to put full-time into it.